Tim Cook says it's too dangerous to create a backdoor to iPhone

February 17, 2016 14:51

Apple Inc, creator of the madly popular iPhone, has been ordered to break into the iPhone of one of the killers in the San Bernardino, California shootings of December last.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in the United States ordered Apple to provide "reasonable technical assistance" to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Specifically, the court wanted a feature disabled whereby the phone automatically erases all its data after a pre-determined number of failed attempts to unlock it.

In December 2015 Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook shot dead 14 people before being killed in a gun battle with the cops. An iPhone was found in their vehicle later, which the cops have been trying to unlock.

Reacting to the court's order, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a letter to his customers: 'We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the US government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone'.

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